Forget the World Cup. It’s so much more exciting to follow the fortunes of BN’s 1Malaysia team in its bid for the world title of Worst Cock-up.

It has certainly scored some major coups in this competition lately, even in the footballing field. Under the leadership of Sports Minister Khairy Jamaluddin, Malaysia has now sunk to an unprecedented number 142 in global FIFA rankings and is fast headed further down.

While at the same time it is truly 1Malaysia in the contest for supremacy in the match-fixing area, with Free Malaysia Today quoting one of the world’s foremost experts in this arena, Canadian author and academic Declan Hill, as declaring that “if there was a gold medal for football match fixing, Malaysia would win it.”

“As I have testified before various parliaments,” he added, “we have to tell the IOC that if Malaysia doesn’t clean up this problem, they will be banned from international sports.”

I doubt that BN would be too fussed by such a ban, however, as it could then concentrate its world-beating efforts on other more serious aspects of its expertise, like election and trial fixing. Plus, of course, the race to the bottom in the global corruption, press-freedom and people-trafficking stakes, in the last of which it has recently achieved level 4 on the US State Department worst-of-the-worst list along with such other great sports as Zimbabwe, North Korea and Saudi Arabia.

And speaking of Saudi Arabia, 1Malaysia has already outdone this and most of its other competitors in the Islamic world by banning Christians from using “Allah”, the generic Arab word for “God”, in Bahasa Malaysia bibles.

Having decades ago decreed that all Malays are by definition Muslim, and thus since claiming that 1Malaysia is superior to those nations where most Arabs may be Muslims but some are permitted not to be.

But as much success and consequent fame as 1Malaysia has achieved on the sporting, fixing, people-trafficking and religious fronts, its most glorious, indeed unprecedented achievement in the world’s Worst Cock-up department so far has surely been the “loss” of MAS flight 370.

This was, and will long if not forever remembered as, a copybook example of the 1Malaysia team’s undying determination to make itself globally famous by hook or by crook, and a truly world-class display of BN’s traditional talents: secrecy, lying, denying, dissembling and incompetence.

And in case anybody on earth had missed this truly dazzling demonstration of 1Malaysia’s specialist skills, 1Malaysia Foreign Minister Anifah Aman has led the team to another triumph in a face-off with New Zealand.

Admittedly this has been a 1-0 loss in purely technical terms, but it has featured such a spectacular own goal as to go down forever in the annals of the world’s Worst Cock-up contest.

Following allegations of burglary and attempted rape against Muhammad Rizalman Ismail, an army warrant officer attached to the Malaysian High Commission in New Zealand, 1Malaysia not only denied a request by the host country for the suspension of the suspect’s diplomatic immunity, but had the unmitigated arrogance to suggest that the case be hushed up.

And actually put this in writing to the New Zealand authorities in a letter requesting them to “kindly consider sealing all documentation pertaining to the above mentioned matter and withdrawing all charges against Muhammad Rizalman Ismail.”

The New Zealand government may well not have elected to release this damning document of its own accord, but was virtually forced to do so following the 1Malaysia Foreign Minister’s flagrantly false claim that the Kiwis had “offered” to allow Muhammad Rizalman Ismail to return home despite his alleged offence.

Rizalman had been repatriated, so the 1Malaysia story went, for the purpose of undergoing “psychiatric assessment” before a possible military court-martial.

Though as everybody knows the entire saga would never have seen the light of day in 1Malaysia, and probably hasn’t even now in 1Malaysia’s so-called mainstream media, if it hadn’t been for the New Zealand media’s unearthing of it by means of their country’s Freedom of Information Act.

And in fact the revelation of this latest own goal against New Zealand is eerily reminiscent of the one scored years ago against Mongolia in the case of the murdered interpreter, Altantuya Shaariibuu.

An own goal that still haunts Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak and the entire 1Malaysia team today, despite Najib’s having sworn on the Quran than he never met the victim, and a “trial” in which the alleged suspects were unaccountably allowed to conceal their identities, Najib and other possible accessories were never called as witnesses, and no effort was made to determine how the victim’s immigration records had come to be erased.

For years Najib himself has been promising to fix as in “transform” this shocking state of affairs, but still his 1Malaysia team keeps playing the people of Malaysia and the rest of the world for fools.

Fixing everything from elections and trials to financial, racial and religious affairs in favour of themselves and their supporters.

And fixing the facts with a line-up of such world-class liars like, to instance only this week, Foreign Minister Anifah Aman with his porkies about New Zealand, Inspector-General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar with his ridiculous claim that his corrupt, homicidal and otherwise “errant” cops are “not protected”; Women, Family and Community Developmet Minister Rohani Abdul Karim with her story that the government is not “arresting” beggars and the homeless in KL but “saving” them by taking them in for “counselling”; and former Information Minister, Zainuddin Maidin with his bizarre attack on BN harlot ‘newspaper’ The Star for “playing into the hands of the DAP” as well as an “extreme and dangerous Christian denomination.”

No wonder 1Malaysia is a contender contention for the title for the World Cup of Cock-ups. And good, honest, intelligent Malaysians’ chances of getting out of this fix are nix until they can get up the guts to get rid of this bunch of criminal prix.